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Friday, November 16, 2012

I wish I could have come out of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Masterflush with excitement at having seen The Great American
Movie so many seem to think it is, because I really respected Anderson’s attempt to work out the poetry and intricately rendered character observation
of a novel into a unique, specifically cinematic voice. But for me this “story”
of a man’s shattered life (and, by extension, a generation’s)-- the quest to recapture a past
that swirls and churns away helplessly out of our grasp, like the turquoise
turmoil in the wake of a ship chugging straight into the future, and the
perilous master-mentor/father-son bond between that man and the imperious
charlatan who takes him under his wing-- finally became belabored, monotonous,
too eager in its obliqueness to ever find the true emotional underpinnings of
this central relationship.

I put “story” in quotes because whatever story there
is happens to be told not so much in the conventional narrative sense but in
the close-ups of Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, searching for some sort of
mooring in the aftermath of an (unseen) experience in the Navy during World War
II, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Livingston Dodd, self-described writer,
doctor, theoretical philosopher and “hopelessly inquisitive” renaissance man
(“Just like you”) who seems to promise the access to a more stable, saved life
through the nascent machinations of his brainchild, The Cause, a
pseudo-religious cult of personality (whose resemblance to Scientology is, in
the end, irrelevant, by the way). Those close-ups, as seen in the 70mm format
in which the movie was mostly shot (camera malfunctions necessitated the
occasional indulgence in 35mm), are presented with an almost hyper-real clarity
and intimacy through the guidance of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr., and they invite us to indulge in the epic battle of wills,
atavistic confusion versus calculated dominance, that is being waged on the
landscape of these actors' fascinating faces.

The problem is that after a while the expressive nature of
that battle, as Anderson frames it, ends up tapering off into a repetition of
points on the elusiveness of organized enlightenment without an apparent
urgency to dramatize those points in a stronger, more effective (the garlic
buzzword here might be “conventional”) way. After a while the movie begins to
feel turgid and listless, as if it were caught in the churning water behind
that navy boat, endlessly cycling deep and back up toward the surface without
ever breaking through to air.

However, the alternative to The Master’s clinical seething doesn’t seem to offer much more
reward. The movie’s big moments consist of Hoffman’s sudden violent
eruptions against those—a sneering skeptic; a believer who notices a strange
word replacement in a new edition of writing that seems to alter everything
that has come before; and of course Freddie in his irrational explosions—who
suggest that Dodd and his Cause are something other than what he
passive-aggressively insists they are. These moments hint at a more
conventional route toward the same sort of interior drama—Dodd, as placid and friendly
as he seems, will harbor no dissent-- but even these scenes, as bold as they
are against the backdrop of the movie’s reticent formal control, don’t add up
to much more than momentary shout-downs, a chance for the actors to blow off
steam.

Again, the anger exploding out of the cells where Dodd and Freddie find
themselves incarcerated after Dodd is arrested for fraud and Freddie resists
arrest on his behalf is a kissing (or yelling) cousin to Jake La Motta’s
inarticulate rage as he punches the walls of his own jail cell, but here it
doesn’t signify much more than two actors and their director playing at being
big, self-important blowhards who like the sound of their own raised voices. To
my mind that confrontation between the smug, opportunistic sway that Dodd holds
over his flock and the articulate resistance to that sway is where the real
meat of the matter is found. Yet by structuring the conflict as one between
Dodd’s slick manipulations, his unquenchable desire to absorb those around him,
and Freddie’s mumbled half-responses and flailing physical acting-out, his
inability to decide whether or not absorption would be death or a step up, the
real electric charge between them gets tamped down, muted, and finally dominated
by Dodd’s demands-- his refusal to back up his theoretical philosophizing
becomes disturbingly similar to Anderson’s own tightly controlled aesthetic. The Master is capped by a perverse
denial of catharsis that feels “real” and suggests a satisfying repudiation of
the sort of randomly imposed order of personality that Dodd represents, yet what
it offers in replacement of that catharsis seems empty.

I’m sure this
confession will tag me a Luddite in terms of the evolution of film grammar
and style, but I walked out of this movie respecting Anderson’s unwillingness
to play the game while simultaneously longing for the sense of a journey
completed that is the hallmark of the more conventionally well-made film. (I’m
not talking about Freddy’s journey, but my own with him.) The comparison is undoubtedly
unbalanced and unfair, but I kept thinking how different The Godfather Part II would be if the story of Michael and Fredo
had ended not with a kiss and one last fishing trip but instead a grim
stare-down, a tear and Michael singing “On a Slow Boat to China” to his
defeated, exhausted brother, followed by Fredo going off for a life-affirming
fuck far from the shadow of the Lake Tahoe compound.

The Master is full
of portent, misplaced, misplayed and even occasionally fulfilled, and its
actors are certainly game. Phoenix commands attention and keeps us riveted through natural magnetism
and at times sheer perversity, and Hoffman, whose self-satisfaction is
sometimes indistinguishable from that of the characters he plays, finds an apt
balance between the narrow purposefulness and the necessary gregariousness that
cult leaders must possess. He makes the viewer understand what draws people,
especially people like Freddie, to Dodd’s flickering flame even if he can’t
quite get at what keeps them fluttering near its heat. For single-minded
intensity, Amy Adams makes an almost subliminally powerful impression as Dodd’s
blunt, non-nonsense wife, the relatively silent support system for his
psychological charade. The story of this proverbial woman behind the man might
have ended up being the most fascinating of all had Anderson made room in his
hermetically sealed conception of the narrative for more of her than just her
icy stare.

I also liked young Jesse Plemons, a ringer for Hoffman who plays Dodd’s dutiful but unimpressed son Val. Plemons, who was the sole point of
amusement in this past summer’s god-awful Battleship,
mostly hangs around the periphery, suggesting an indifferent heir to what might
end up becoming an empire of psychological ephemera. “He’s making it all up as
he goes along, you know,” he tells Freddy at one point regarding his father’s
methods. It’s a singular and great moment of clarity that Freddy is of course not
ready to hear, and in it Plemons mixes up a truth-teller’s burden with a barely
suppressed degree of delight that this nugget is coming from the one person on
whose support his grandiloquent charlatan of a dad ought to be able to count
but cannot.

I have suggested above that there might (might) be an uncomfortable parallel between Dodd’s methods and those
of Paul Thomas Anderson, but one thing’s for sure-- I don’t think Anderson is
making it up as he goes along. There was a Q&A following last night’s
screening at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, rather artlessly
moderated by a woman whose name I did not catch. Among the guests were the
movie’s editor, Leslie Jones, legendary production designer Jack Fisk, and Amy
Adams. One of the points suggested, by both Jones and Adams at separate points
in the conversation, was that as Anderson has matured (their word) as a
filmmaker, his on-set methods have loosened up and he’s become more open to
ideas that seem conjured on the fly or through production discussion with his
collaborators. But one thing has struck me most profoundly about Anderson since
Punch-Drunk Love, which I loved and
which in retrospect seems more like a crucial transitional film rather than the
lark many took it for at the time—whether or not his methods have become
looser, more all-encompassing, the actual aesthetic of Paul Thomas Anderson has
become ever more controlled, airtight, prescribed, weighty, figured out to
within an inch of its life.

Anderson is hardly a joyless filmmaker—I don’t think even at their most grim
the visual palette of There Will Be Blood
or The Master suggest anything of the
sort-- and neither could he be credibly accused of lacking humor. But his
latest movies never feel like they could take off, arrive as somewhere other
than a predetermined destination, could act the fool, in the way that Magnolia or Boogie Nights, to their mutual credit and detriment, often did. The Master doesn’t seem as alive to myriad
possibilities and happenstance as those admittedly uneven, unwieldy, infinitely
more entertaining movies do, or certainly those of Robert Altman, Anderson’s
declared mentor and inspiration. It’s mounted as sober, weighty, an art film with high-profile Oscar hopes (this is a Weinstein Company release, after all), and though I would never discount the seriousness with which it is being
received by a lot of people I know and read and respect, that weighty quality doesn’t
bear out with the sort of philosophical grasping at straws and strained
elusiveness which I saw as, to paraphrase Vin Scully, The Master’s bread and butter pitch.

I fully expect I’ll live with The Master for a while, Lancaster Dodd
(and PTA?) insinuating and demanding and shouting at me, trying to break down
my resistance, and maybe my initial dissatisfaction will morph into something
more accepting, more appreciative than what these initial sketchy observations
have yielded right now. (Such a thing has been known to happen, and heaven
knows my initial less-than-rapturous response has already gotten me into
trouble at home.) But I’ll reserve judgment on Anderson as the filmmaking
savior of his generation for now, if this film is Exhibit A or even B, in the
hopes that he makes more movies which feel like flights of life lived and
observed and less like a boat adrift on waves of rhetorical questions about the
same.

8 comments:

Dennis, I'm less critical toward The Master than you are but it is telling, from the critical perspective, that Anderson cut a line included in one of the trailers -- Freddie saying to Dodd, "I know you're trying to calm me down but just tell me something that's true." That seems like a conscious decision to avoid the sort of definitive thematic statement or moment many critics seem to be looking for. I can't really imagine the Freddie of the theatrical release saying something like that -- which suggests that Anderson may well have made some of this up as he went along.

Great review, DC: thanks for this verbalization of themes that I felt, but since the movie didn't really excite me too much, never bothered to articulate. Honestly, I think PTA should have written/created The Master to have been a novel in the style of Rudy Wurlitzer or Steve Erickson or even Pynchon (all of whom show an interest in 1970s SoCal--like PTA), before turning it into a film. But I did love/hate the Extreme "ACTING" going on: wow, so much award-bait! Can't wait for the Oscar-season clip shows!Once again, Thanks!IvanPS: My password is "Etsxpa 9," which sound like a Soviet-era space exploration movie!

I had a generally similar reaction to the movie. My take on it is that Freddie Quell is an invincibly fucked-up person who Dodd takes on as a test case for his pseudo-scientific mental health regime, as opposed to the poor little rich kids with nothing wrong with them who make up most of his flock. Regardless of how long Dodd persists Freddie remains resolutely fucked up. This is the point where you turn your pseudo-science into a religion. It's a kind of perverse triumph of the human spirit, as Freddie remains immune to this spiritually empty therapeutic regime but as a result remains miserable and doomed. The trouble with it as drama is that there's no character development, everybody stays the way they are.

Dennis, I agree completely with your review, and let me just say that I damn well wish I could write as well as you do. That being said, as a theater director I think about casting first, and I wouldn't have cast Joaquin Phoenix. I don't think he provides enough variance in his performance to keep me with him for even half of this film. I grew tired of the extreme close-ups of his tortured face, and frustrated with Dodd's continued dedication to this loser experiment; we see long before Dodd that it is going nowhere fast. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, it was nuanced, interesting and I was drawn to him. The final scene made me nuts, a wrap- up scene like this should be avoided like the plague in most cases, and in this one the film most certainly hadn't earned it.

My $0.02 is that people who want "conventional" stories get 15 out of the 16 screens in any suburban multiplex on any given day, where they can be told exactly how to feel and what to think and leave with the satisfied feeling of having worked it all out for themselves and looking forward to the sequel and/or remake. I'll take any PTA film any day over any of that. For starters, try this on: when you want something too much you set yourself up for failure, exploitation, or both; and Freddy's journey out of and eventually back into his life is much more triumphant than even he seems to understand. I'll be seeing this one again, and probably again after that, and never get tired of it. Can you really say the same about the latest live-action comic book, costume drama or rom-com?